


A Garden of Sorrows and Hope

by onstraysod



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (TV), Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Canon Compliant, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-05
Updated: 2018-07-05
Packaged: 2019-06-05 23:31:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15181730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onstraysod/pseuds/onstraysod
Summary: While recovering from his gunshot wound, John Childermass is troubled by strange dreams. In a barren country he encounters a cottage and a woman and a garden full of remarkable plants. The dream - if it is a dream - seems laden with significance for the future. But will Childermass remember it when he wakes up?





	A Garden of Sorrows and Hope

Every night during his convalescence, John Childermass went walking. Not physically, of course, for the physicians had recommended bedrest until his wound had sufficiently healed. Childermass placed no more faith in this remedy than he did in their bloodletting and tonics, and each day he was caught at least once - by the other servants or Norrell or the doctor himself - out of bed, pacing restlessly about the room or standing by the window, looking out for some lingering manifestation of magic floating above Hanover-square like an errant cloud. No, every night his body was compliant, remaining prone in his bed. 

But nonetheless he walked.

Nothing remained of his nightly voyages each morning but the vaguest traces of memory, yet Childermass knew that he had walked far, for he felt the weariness of it in his bones. That was nonsensical, for Childermass also knew that his journeys were nothing more than dreams. And yet, at the same time, there was a realness about them that remained with him during his waking hours, long after the details of his sojourns had faded from his mind: a physical exhaustion, a coldness that clung to his skin as if he had wandered through a wintry landscape where frost limned every branch and blade of grass and no sun shone. 

So each day he sat propped up against pillows, staring at his reflection in the big gilt-framed mirror that hung on the opposite wall, hurling a few choice words at that dark, lanky fellow for being nothing better than a layabout, and a foolish one at that. And every night, when lassitude overcame him despite his best efforts, he slid into sleep and his journey began.

On one of those nights, it went thus:

He found himself standing upon a rough track in a wide country of bare, windswept hills. Here and there upon their crowns large stones were grouped in crooked circles, upthrust from the earth or tumbled down, the remnants of ancient tumuli. At first Childermass thought himself alone, but then he noticed some yards ahead of him a boy, standing still and silent as a carven stone. Carven he appeared, for he was all sharp edges: jutting cheekbones, knife-point elbows, knobby knees. Eleven or twelve he appeared to be, bone-pale and dressed in rags, his black hair long and shaggy around a narrow, sullen face, and for a moment Childermass thought he was seeing an image of himself as a child, for once he had looked much the same. But it was not him: this boy’s eyes were not dark, but gray as frozen water and just as cold, filled with a knowledge that Childermass knew he hadn’t possessed at such an age. As he watched the boy, the child lifted a skinny arm and beckoned, then turned and began to walk away down the track. Whether he wished to or not, Childermass followed.

He made no attempt to speak to the boy. Something told him he would get no response for his trouble. So he followed in silence, a silence broken by nothing but the whistling wind, as the track went up and down, up and down, dipping into dells and rising over the brow of each ridge, until at last they came upon a little stone cottage set in the hollow at the base of three adjoining hills.

The pale boy stopped, turned, and extended a bony finger. Childermass shrugged and walked in the direction indicated.

A rickety gate hung on rusted hinges, blocking the path to the cottage’s door. When Childermass pushed it open, the hinges screamed in protest, a sound uncannily like a raven’s caw. Immediately the cottage door flew open and a woman emerged, her skirts gathered up in one hand. She was young and comely, dark-haired and dark-eyed, and as she ran toward him, Childermass was struck by the thought that he knew her. But who she might be, and from where he might know her, eluded Childermass. There was a wildness in her eyes that he did not recognize.

“Have you brought him?” she cried, her voice breathless with desperation. She stood staring at Childermass expectantly, then walked in a full circle around him. Coming back to his front, she gave him a look of such reproach and misery that Childermass felt inclined to apologize, though he knew not what for. “You have not brought him,” she muttered, letting her head fall into her hands for a moment before turning and walking briskly back inside.

“Madam?” Bewildered, Childermass followed her into the cottage. She stood at a long table, her hands flying busily at some work, fresh-shed tears staining her cheeks. 

“You disappoint me, John Childermass,” she said, not lifting her eyes from her work. Her voice was husky, as if sprung from a throat raw with screaming. “I thought you had some wisdom of your own fashion. I thought some special knowledge had been vouchsafed you. But it turns out you are as dull as the rest of them. Illiterate.”

Childermass opened his mouth: he meant to ask how it was that the lady knew his name when he could not think of hers, and what it was she had expected of him that he had so failed to accomplish. But no such words came from his lips. Instead he found himself saying: “What is it that you work at so intently, madam?” For he had noticed that the table was strewn with small pieces of paper. As he watched her, the woman picked up one piece after another, dipped a pen in ink, and hastily wrote upon the paper, rolling up each slip before setting it aside and beginning the process again. Her pace of work was feverish, and she never looked up, not even when she answered him.

“I must sow my garden. These are its seeds. My prayers and pleadings, my supplications. The earth receives them, nutures them, until they bloom and take flight.” She gathered a handful of the rolled-up papers and at last glanced up at Childermass. “Come. There is both planting and reaping to be done.”

The woman led him out another door, back into the cold countryside of barren, treeless hills. But immediately before him lay an enormous garden, row after row of neatly tilled earth stretching into the distance, climbing a steep slope and disappearing over its crest. Each row was studded with the black leaves of strange plants, rippling and dancing in the frigid breeze. The first row closest to the cottage was empty of blooms, and it was here that the woman knelt, careless of her skirts. She began scooping out holes in the dirt with her fingers.

“Twelve seeds for every row. One row for every year he is destined to be parted from me,” she explained. Childermass glanced again into the distance. There were a hundred rows at least, undulating over the distant hill. As he looked again he noticed a scarecrow at the top of the slope, though he might have sworn that no such thing had been there a moment before. It stood with both arms outstretched, its ragged black clothes fluttering about it like the tattered edges of a thundercloud. Something about it made the hairs on the back of Childermass’s sleeping neck stand on end.

“Every seed is a plea for mercy,” the woman told him, dropping the little rolls of paper into each hole, covering it with loose earth. “I water them with my tears. This is my life now, John Childermass: I plant my hopes and reap my disappointments. For there is only one who can take pleasure in such a crop.”

With this, she reached over to the next row and took hold of the bundled black leaves of one of the plants. But no, Childermass realized with a start: they were not leaves at all. The woman pulled and up came the plant that was, in fact, a raven: the bird screamed, its head and beak at last released from the earth in which it had grown. The woman let go of its tail feathers and the raven took flight, shaking dirt from its wings as it hurled itself into the sky, cawing as it flew.

“Each one carries my pleas,” she told him, pulling raven after raven from the ground, flinging the full-grown birds into the air. “But will he receive them? I tell you, John Childermass, I will not give up. I will not cease my petitions. Even if my fingers bleed, even if I wear them down to the bone!” She held her soil-stained hands up before Childermass’s face; dirt had mingled with her tears, painting dark streaks down her cheeks. Pity filled him, but fear filled him too: the woman’s eyes burned with a determination that was almost maniacal, and he believed in her determination, believed that she would remain there, scraping out holes in that fathomless garden, for as long as she needed to. Even after death, if that was required of her: a wraith of bones and rags and macabre beauty, tilling ravens in the merciless soil.

“He cannot ignore me forever,” the woman told Childermass, and with that she turned and fled back inside the cottage, the door slamming closed at her back. But Childermass remained outside, the cold wind pulling at his coat.

With a thrill of dread, he looked at the scarecrow upon the brow of the hill. Something compelled him and he started to trudge up the slope, taking the narrow path that cut each row of growing ravens in two. Halfway up, his mind at last stirred itself and he remembered with a shock who the woman in the cottage was. Surely she was Arabella Strange, the wife of the second magician? But why should he find her here, in this forbidding country, alone and engaged in so odd and mournful a task?

Above him, the scarecrow shivered in the wind, the black ribbons of its unraveling hems, its long, loose hair, whipping around its limp form. As Childermass neared it, the figure’s lolling head lifted, its outstretched arms fell, and he realized that what he had taken for a bunch of old clothes stuffed with straw had been a living man all along, standing crooked and motionless on the brow of the hill. The man was very pale, black-haired and gaunt, and his clothes were the finery of another age. His gray-eyed gaze was imperious and cold. Childermass had never seen him before, yet - as with Arabella Strange - there was something eerily familiar about him, like a landmark on a new road one is sure they have passed before.

“Some calamity has befallen the second magician,” Childermass told the man, wondering as the words left his tongue why he was doing so.

The man smiled, mirthless and knowing. “It is a spell,” he answered, and his voice was a strange blend of northern burr and archaic foreign tones. “It will be woven by my worst enemy, yet I will sustain it.”

“Why?” Childermass demanded. “Who are you to do such a thing?”

The man turned to regard Childermass for the first time, his eyes shining with cruel bemusement. “Do not you know, John Childermass?”

Abashed, Childermass paused, searching his memory desperately for a name. But his mind seemed dull as a stone. Rousing his outrage again, Childermass said: “I do not, sir. Have we met before?”

“Time and time again, though you remember it in your soul alone. Did I not sit once by the side of your poor cradle, a mere crate in which you lay swaddled in dirty rags? Was I not the beggar whom you took pity on one day in the streets of Newcastle, sharing with me your meager stolen meal? Did you not see me on a night of storm, standing in the rigging of your merchant ship, watching you pace the deck below? I have always been near you, John Childermass.”

The hot anger turned to ice, stilling him. “Who are you?” Childermass asked hoarsely.

“You know who I am. Always you’ve known, for the North is in your blood and I am the North, and all that belongs to it I claim as my own. Lord and peasant, pooka and black shuck, tree and river and stone. John Childermass and his Cards of Marseilles.” The man smiled again, a cunning, feral movement of his lips. “Whenever you’ve walked through shadows and felt you were not alone, there I was. Whenever the hackles on the back of your neck were raised, there I stood, whispering.”

The cogs and gears within Childermass’s mind seemed rusted, unable to turn. He still could not think who the strange man might be. But looking back at the cottage below, he thrust out an accusing finger. “You say you have such power, then why will you do nothing for the second magician? For his wife?”

The man had gathered up his voluminous black cloak around him, as if he were about to stride away. “If you think my treatment unjust, John Childermass, then end the spell.”

“Me? How??”

“Every seneschal of mine must demonstrate their worth,” the man said, and he did turn then, brushing the air with an elegant hand that sparkled with jeweled rings. “All that you need shall be left to you, but you must learn where to look for my instructions, and how to read them.” 

The man’s cloak fluttered behind him like a raven’s wings, and the wind rose, colder suddenly and smelling of rain. Childermass trembled and looked again at the cottage, then turned back to find the man gone. A thick mist was racing up the hill towards him: its edges, like a shredded winding sheet, wrapped around him until all the wide landscape was lost to his sight.

When Childermass pried his eyes open, he saw the first feeble light of dawn painting his room in watery colors, reflecting off the glass of the big mirror on the opposite wall. He coughed and shifted on his pillow, and slowly he remembered that he had dreamed. A long and detailed dream it seemed to have been, and Childermass could just feel the edges of it, the way a blind man identifies an object from its shape. But no matter how hard he concentrated, he could recall nothing about it except coldness and a cottage and a forlorn scarecrow, standing on the crest of a hill. Frustration mounted inside him until he balled his hands tightly atop the counterpane.

And felt something crinkle inside his right fist.

Opening his fingers, Childermass found that he was holding a small slip of paper, curled into a tight roll. Perplexed, he opened it carefully, smoothing its wrinkles out against his chest. The paper was blank except for a single word or phrase, written hastily with a dripping pen. But the writing was of a kind wholly alien to him: a jumble of swirls and symbols, quartered circles and dots like constellations. Yet somehow - _somehow_ \- Childermass knew what it said.

“Please.”

This seemed important to Childermass, though he had no idea why it should be. But he struggled out of bed and limped over to the chair where his greatcoat lay draped, pushing the paper deep into one of its pockets. Once he was recovered, when his head was clear, perhaps he would be able to remember his dream. Perhaps he would remember to examine the paper again and puzzle out its significance.

He hobbled back to the bed and, before long, he was asleep again.

And he forgot.


End file.
